Seasonal semi-supervised domain adaptation for linking population studies and Local Climate Zones

Environment and demographic dynamics are strongly linked. However, relevant data to study this interaction may be scarce especially in sub-Saharan Africa where it is not always possible to perform such studies with a high temporal frequency. Satellite imagery, when linked to demographic data, can be a significant asset to estimate missing data as it covers every country with both high spatial and temporal resolution. We aim to take advantage of satellite data to characterize the environment in inter-tropical areas. This environment is regulated by the changing of two seasons that are essential to consider. We introduce a semi-supervised domain adaptation strategy for neural networks based on seasonal changes. This strategy can be used to produce land cover maps in regions of the world where limited labeled datasets are available. We apply this method to produce environmental indicators and link them to malaria rates from the Malaria Indicator Survey of Burkina Faso. We show that malaria rates are correlated not only to urbanisation but also to the environmental characterisation of studied areas.